The La Guardia and Wagner Archives was established in 1982 at LaGuardia Community College/CUNY in Long Island City, Queens, New York, to collect, preserve, and make available primary materials documenting the social and political history of New York City. Its web site provides guidelines to the collections, as well as over 55,000 digitized photographs and 1,000,000 digitized documents.

The Dreamer (and Doer)

Fiorello La Guardia: The Dreamer (and Doer)

Friday, February 8, 2013

Constance Baker Motley and Thurgood Marshall

Constance Baker Motley, James Meredith and Jack Greenberg

Steven A. Levine

Coordinator for Educational Programs

The Archives
recently conducted an oral history with Joel Motley about his mother Constance
Baker Motley, the great NAACP Legal Defense Fund (LDF) lawyer and federal
judge. We asked him specifically whether
Thurgood Marshall had passed her over to be director of the LDF when he left in
1961 to a federal judgeship on the U.S. Court of Appeals. He said that Marshall probably thought that
it would have been “an extra burden” for an African-American woman to take on
that role at that time. (Click here to watch the
video.)

I was reading Judge
Motley’s autobiography today, Equal
Justice Under the Law, and found
that she largely agreed with her son, but that there was another layer to the
decision related to the competition between Marshall and Robert Carter,
the general counsel of the NAACP which was separate from the LDF. Marshall mistakenly thought Motley was
aligned with Carter and instead turned to their LDF colleague Jack Greenberg to
be his successor at the LDF.
Interestingly, Bella Abzug supported Motley, as did Mississippi NAACP
leader Medgar Evers. (To read the excerpt from Motley’s autobiography, click
here.)

As we in the
Northeast wait out the blizzard, it’s a good moment to think about how we can
learn from different sources and how we can teach ourselves and our students
about the nature of sources and how to interpret them. If you would like to learn more about the
civil rights movement, check out our primary source lesson on Mississippi Freedom Summer. As always, please feel free to contact me if
you want to learn more about this or any other Archives related
topics.